Natural Resources

As a graduate student at California State University Northridge in the mid-1970s, the late Marge Feinberg began rabble-rousing for a "green belt" of wildlife habitats, parks and recreational areas encircling the San Fernando Valley. She even copyrighted the title she devised in her master's thesis — the Rim of the Valley Parks — a moniker that evoked the romance of the West's rugged peaks and sage-scented canyons. Over the years, politicians and conservationists took up Feinberg's cause, and now, more than four decades after she proposed the idea, the National Park Service has resolved that a much larger network of mountains, forests, valleys and...

Related "Natural Resources" Articles

As a graduate student at California State University Northridge in the mid-1970s, the late Marge Feinberg began rabble-rousing for a "green belt" of wildlife habitats, parks and recreational areas encircling the San Fernando Valley.
She even...

As Californians prepare to confront the coming hot, dry summer months, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed more than $2 billion in additional drought funding Thursday as part of his revised state budget.
The surge in funding comes mostly from Proposition 1, a...

With Californians increasing efforts to deal with the drought, lawmakers got an update Tuesday on exactly how bad things are and heard little to cheer them.
Among other areas of concern, about 1,900 wells have gone dry, Mark Cowin, director of the...

During the last major drought in the early 1990s, Irvine pioneered a different approach for calculating water bills for customers.
The city's water agency allocated each customer a certain amount of water and then charged higher rates to those who...

Here in California's thirsty farm belt, where pumpjacks nod amid neat rows of crops, it's a proposition that seems to make sense: using treated oil field wastewater to irrigate crops.
Oil giant Chevron recycles 21 million gallons of that water each day...

The Brown administration's effort to speed innovation to address the state's endemic droughts was launched to little fanfare Tuesday.
No specific funding or timeline was included in the program posted to the California Energy Commission's website. A...

It will take some time to fully grasp the consequences of Monday's court decision rejecting San Juan Capistrano's tiered rate structure for water. Gov. Jerry Brown said the ruling would make it harder for local governments to encourage conservation, and...

To the editor: I hope you received lots of outraged letters about the jaw-droppingly selfish customer who asked whom he should sue for the decrease in his property's value when his landscaping dies. Meanwhile, the Desert Water Agency general manager who...

In response to numerous complaints, state regulators Saturday issued a revised plan for California's first-ever mandatory water cuts, emphasizing the need for urgent action as summer looms.
The drought, which started in 2012, could persist for years,...

The state Water Resources Control Board is scheduled to release its draft emergency water conservation regulations Saturday morning, in a historic bid to slash California’s urban water use by 25%.
Water board officials had planned to release the...

A rare rain was falling outside, but that wasn't enough to lift the spirits of Felicia Marcus, California's top water regulator, on a recent morning.
First, her staff announced that residents up and down the state had barely cut back their water use...

The rich, it turns out, use more water than the rest of us. The Times reported last week that residents of wealthy cities such as Beverly Hills use up to four times as much water, on average, than residents of neighboring Los Angeles, even during the...

The agency that regulates the oil industry in California is — by its own admission — in disarray. After a series of embarrassing disclosures about regulatory lapses that allowed drilling in protected aquifers, officials at the Division of Oil, Gas and...

Many urban thinkers say an environmentally sustainable Los Angeles would have higher-density housing with shared gardens and fewer of the single-family homes with lawns that are prevalent in Southern California. Such an urban landscape would reduce the...

No matter how much longer California’s drought lingers, politicians don’t have the power to make it rain. So on Thursday they tried the next best thing – they proposed showering the state’s parched landscape with money.
Gov. Jerry Brown and top...

The agencies charged with overseeing oil production and protecting California's ever-dwindling water sources from the industry's pollution all fell down on the job, one state official told a panel of peeved lawmakers Tuesday.
During a testy two-hour...

On Tuesday, state lawmakers took their turn lambasting California's beleaguered oil and gas agency at a hearing in which senators called the agency's historic practices corrupt, inept and woefully mismanaged.
For two hours, legislators grilled the...

Water officials in Kern County discovered that oil producers have been dumping chemical-laden wastewater into hundreds of unlined pits that are operating without proper permits.Inspections completed this week by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality...

Hoping to better understand the health effects of oil fracking, the state in 2013 ordered oil companies to test the chemical-laden waste water extracted from wells.
Data culled from the first year of those tests found significant concentrations of the...

To the editor: Your editorial highlights a critical issue that's frequently left out of the conversation: We can't effectively tackle climate change without looking at our runaway population growth and overconsumption. And it's not just the climate that's...